O.K. i'm a newbie to picaxe and arduino, never used them before but i thought i'd give them a shot for a project i'm going to do.
Right the project is to build a slave robot arm and hand to be controlled in near real time by a set of bend sensors and pots on a glove and arm bracket on my own arm.
Now the the slave robot will be small scale first, and then i'd like to beef up the servos and build a bigger version near 1:1 scale, so the controller would have to be able to work with the bigger servo's later on if that make any difference.
Now i've been looking up the pro's an con's of picaxe and arduino, but i just cant make up my mind what is best for my project.
I've seen people use both for similar projects (like just a hand, or an arm) but not exactly both, so any help would be appricated before i buy one or the other and then find out later i should of bought the other one :)
For what your planning I would say arduino. I think with a picaxe your only option would be a 40x one but you still could run out of i/o’s if your project is as big as you plan. I think an arduino would do you well since you will have so many servos and sensors. Plus I think arduinos stronger than picaxe. Check out Oddbot’s Spider controller.
build a couple different game solving robots with PICAXE 08Ms. The first of the two was a simple arm moved by 3 servos, 2 for the shoulder and one for the gripper. I believe you could readily produce exactly what you are after with a pair of 18s be they x1, x2, m or m2s. It would require you to set up an I2C, SPI or simple serial bridge between the two; more education :). The choice really boils down to how you want to do what you want to do. There are a number of ways that will work. It is up to you to decide which one you prefer. Heck, you could connect your positional sensors to your computer somehow and have the computer spit out commands to your arm, that might require a second uC as well to make it easier to communicate with the computer.
